Obama has explaining to do on Benghazi

By Jason Chaffetz, Special to CNN

Updated 6:18 PM ET, Sat May 11, 2013

Photos: Benghazi attack hearing8 photos

Benghazi attack hearing – Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission in Libya, arrives for a House committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, May 8. State Department employees testified about the terror attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed. View photos of the attack.

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Photos: Benghazi attack hearing8 photos

Benghazi attack hearing – From left, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Counterterrorism Mark Thompson; Hicks; and Eric Nordstrom, a diplomatic security officer and former regional security officer in Libya, are sworn in before the hearing. The three are testifying at the hearing investigating into whether the State Department misled the public about the assault.

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Benghazi attack hearing – Nordstrom testifies on May 8. He said in written testimony it was "inexplicable" that a followup internal State Department review ignored "the role senior department leadership played before, during, and after" the attack.

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Benghazi attack hearing – Dorothy Narvaez-Woods, center, listens as Hicks testifies. She is the widow of Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, who was killed in the attack.

Benghazi attack hearing – Nordstrom listens to Hicks testify. Hicks has been praised by Republicans as a "whistleblower." He has expressed concern that more could have been done by the military to protect those being attacked last year at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.

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Benghazi attack hearing – Thompson testifies on May 8. He is the State Department's acting deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism.

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Benghazi attack hearing – Ray Smith, left, and Pat Smith listen as Thompson testifies. Their son Sean was one of the four Americans killed in the terror attack.

In testimony that sharply contradicted the Obama administration's initial narrative of the September 11, 2012, terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, three witnesses shared firsthand accounts this week of what happened before, during and after the attack.

The three testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, recounting the horrific events that took the lives of four heroic Americans that day at the U.S. Consulate. Much of what we have known about Benghazi to this point has come from Obama administration sources. The accounts of these brave witnesses raise troubling questions about the veracity of what we've been told by official sources since the attack took place.

The first contradiction pits former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's explanation of security conditions at the compound against that of Eric Nordstrom, the former regional security officer at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli. In his testimony Wednesday, he repeated assertions he'd made to Congressional investigators last year that his recommendations to upgrade security were ignored at the highest levels.

Even more disturbing was the discrepancy over what happened during the attack. The official story in the Accountability Review Board (ARB) report concluded there was no "undue" denial of support or assets. Yet we heard testimony from Deputy Chief of Mission Greg Hicks that four special operations military personnel in Tripoli were preparing to go to Benghazi on a rescue mission when they were told to stand down. This is jarring, taken against then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's claim in February that "time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning. . . prevented a more immediate response."

Furthermore, the Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST), which the State Department's website calls "the United States Government's only interagency, on-call, short-notice team poised to respond to terrorist incidents worldwide" was not called into action.

For nearly two weeks after the attack, the Obama administration continued to peddle the story that it began as a demonstration against a video and got out of hand -- a claim that is now universally understood to be false. But at Wednesday's hearing, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-South Carolina, quoted what he said was an internal e-mail dated the day after the attack in which Assistant Secretary of State Beth Jones told the Libyan ambassador that Islamic group Ansar al-Sharia was responsible for the attack.

The video claim was pure fiction, but Hicks testified that he was reassigned to a lower-level position after he questioned it. (A State Department spokesman maintains that Hicks was not subjected to retaliation.)

More troubling than the initial video claim, however, is the allegation of serious flaws in the report issued by the Accountability Review Board, convened by Clinton, whose members include retired diplomat Thomas R. Pickering and retired Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All three career diplomats who testified Wednesday complained about the report, which they said was incomplete and assigned blame to the wrong personnel.

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As Congressional investigators have tried to get answers, the State Department has thrown up roadblocks. For example, Hicks testified that the State Department sent a lawyer from Washington in an unsuccessful attempt to ensure that I did not speak to him privately during my visit to Libya after the attacks.

These concerted efforts by the State Department to conceal information from Congress should raise red flags.

We have four dead Americans. To date, nobody has been captured or killed. The terrorists are still on the run. And we have an increasing number of contradictions between what we were led to believe and what the witnesses say actually happened. It's hard to take any refutations of the testimony seriously given the impeccable credentials of the witnesses and the despicable record of misdirection from this administration.